News

Stefan Richter, CTO of Freiheit.com, explained this week at the Google Developer Day in Munich, his vision for writing rich internet applications using HTML5 and Google App Engine and why he thinks that it will be more difficult to build a client-side component based HTML5 when compared to Server-based page rendering.

JRuby's Charles Nutter is making Maven artifacts installable as RubyGems. An alternative to using Maven is JavaGems, built on RubyGems, Bundler and Gemcutter to make it easier to install libraries for Scala, Clojure and other JVM languages. Also, JRuby gets the ability to generate real Java classes.

Clojure 1.1 RC1 is out and cuts the overhead of functional programming with a few new constructs: transients bring controlled mutability for persistent data structures; chunked sequences make lazy sequences more efficient. InfoQ takes a look at what makes these improvements work.

FlightCaster recently open sourced Crane, a tool for distributing and remotely controlling Clojure instances, currently specialized for EC2. Incanter is a Clojure library and tool that makes R-like statistical computations easy with Clojure. Also: the build and dependency management tool Leiningen 1.0 is now available.

Managing libraries and dependencies is tedious. Clojars is a new hosted repository for Clojure libraries inspired by Ruby Gems and Gemcutter. Together with a new build tool, Leiningen, Clojars takes the pain out of library management. InfoQ talked to Alex Osborne about Clojars and how it works.

In this interview from QCon London 2009, Rich Hickey talks about Clojure. The discussion includes the ideas behind Clojure's STM support, what other concurrency primitives Clojure supports and which ones might get added in the future. Other topics covered are Clojure's AOT support, the role and implementation of multimethods, Clojure ports to other systems and much more.

In this phone interview that took place in front of an audience at OOPSLA 2008, Guy Steele spins a yarn with John McCarthy, the father of Lisp, attempting to find out some details surrounding the language inception in the 50’ and its later evolution.

In this presentation recorded at OOPSLA 2008, Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel reenact their presentation called "The Evolution of Lisp" which took place during ACM History of Languages Conference in 1993.

Clojure is a JVM based LISP with interesting properties for concurrency (persistent data structures, STM). New libraries for Clojure are popping up - and some of them are inspired by Ruby libraries such as HAML, ActiveRecord, Rack, and others. We also look at combining JRuby and Clojure to get the best of both Ruby and LISP world, as well as access to technologies such as STM.

Clojure, a LISP-style language for the JVM, is gaining interest quickly. One of the reasons is definitely its approach to concurrency which builds on Software Transactional Memory (STM). We talked to Stuart Halloway who's writing the first book on Clojure for the Pragmatic Programmers.

A production health-care application built using Clojure (among other languages) has been announced, and is now running live. Several details have been provided regarding the architecture, deployment, and runtime behavior of the application.

In this RubyFringe talk, Reginald Braithwaite shows how to write Ruby that reads, writes, and rewrites Ruby. The demos include extending the Ruby language with conditional expressions, new forms of evaluation such as call-by-name and call-by-need, and more.

Ola Bini, a core JRuby developer and author of the book Practical JRuby on Rails Projects, has been developing a new language for the JVM called Ioke. This strongly typed, extremely dynamic, prototype based object oriented language aims to give developers the same kind of power they get with Lisp and Ruby, combined with a nice, small, regular syntax.